The 2026 Whitney Biennial Swaps Identity for Infrastructure.
This year’s Whitney Biennial spotlights “the greater United States”—a term from historian Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. It describes not only the country’s 50 states but also its occupied countries, annexes, military bases, and territories. Strategically, Immerwahr argues, words like “colony” and “empire” have been evaded by officials since World War II—but that’s just semantics. As the country turns 250, the 2026 Whitney Biennial—that storied finger on the pulse of American art—takes a deliberate look beyond the “logo map,” another of Immerwahr’s terms for the geographic shape most people picture when they think of “the United States.” Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer included artists from US-occupied Okinawa, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; from Chile, where the US engaged in clandestine interventions; from current and former territories, like Puerto Rico and the Philippines; and from Palestine, where the US continues to fund a genocide. The move is both timeless and timely: while I was writing this review, my phone buzzed to inform me that Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, had been killed …
